Hi T Tomato,

Here are three resources on the Blockchain ledger, which could unglamorously be as significant a technology re this "Society, Information Technology, and the Global University" course (http://worlduniversityandschool.org/InfoTechNetworkSocGlobalUniv.html) as computing, microelectronics, and telecommunications, as well as the genetic engineering revolution (as the four main technological focuses of this course):

Blockchain ledger resources (about which you'll find more, undoubtedly)

"Anonymized Health Token (AHT)" -

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeoYOyqOZ00 (and I've engaged this video a bit here - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2017/10/gloriosa-genus-stanford-medicine-grand.html - and in one or two other blog posts - all re online Medical Schools with the blockchain ledger for health data ... and here's a post from 2015 focusing on the Blockchain - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2015/12/sand-dollar-in-big-picture-of-planning.html - with some Wikipedia definitions).

"Blockchain - The New Technology of Trust" - http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/blockchain/ (about which I posted here - http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2017/10/cirque-of-towers-wind-river-range.html - in October).

"Blockchain for Business - An Introduction to Hyperledger Technologies: A primer to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. Learn how to start building blockchain applications with Hyperledger frameworks" - an edX course

https://www.edx.org/course/blockchain-business-introduction-linuxfoundationx-lfs171x

Eudaimonics' related article and information technology and re Gates and Jobs - https://eand.co/techs-biggest-challenge-yet-8156486fd022 (Jobs is barefoot in this picture :) - re the Steve Jobs' and Bill Gates' video interview only in some ways ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvhW8cp15tk

And here's my "Eudaimonia (personal flourishing) is 'Flow' and Bliss" - http://scottmacleod.com/EudaimoniaFlow.htm - which I mentioned relatedly.

Concerning next week's class and your riffing with writing an introductory paragraph to your 5 page research paper, I could see specifically inquiring about how the Blockchain will be revolutionary within the context of the course, then how it might articulate with a cryptocurrency not only for financial exchanges - re the economy side of this course - but also for health data which will complicate things, - and also as part of an Universal Basic Income, where "universal" could be said to have a societal aspect to it (per the "society" focus of this course), and re major WUaS Universities in all ~200 countries' official languages - https://wiki.worlduniversityandschool.org/wiki/Nation_States - with law schools, law students, and computer science Ph.D. students to do all the coding of the blockchain ledger. "I want to argue / suggest that the blockchain ledger represents a further paradigm shift in the information age ... " is the kind of thesis I think is helpful in writing an academic paper, because it allows one to back this up with points / paragraphs / and evidence, say in 3-5 further paragraphs. But your research question may inform your argument in a very different way. And a good thesis (Castells' thinking is full of theses / arguments which are disputable) could be argued against ... or the evidence / points you back up your argument with, could support a very different thesis too - which makes for the art of writing a social science / economics/business paper. In some ways I'm looking for a well-reasoned (re logic questions) paper (and there are some 3-4 page papers here - http://scottmacleod.com/papers.htm - which I wrote at UCSB some years ago, which are closely reasoned, some of which I could share with you, if that would be helpful, re the kind of paper I in this course am looking for).

Cheers,

Scott

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Behaviorist theory & Operant conditioning

CURIOUS how to engage a kind of behaviorist theory re schedules of reinforcement (e.g. re Harvard's B.F. Skinner, about whom I've blogged about recently in three different blogs) to explain, for example, these three behaviors:

- photo sharing, much from social media, of mostly cat pictures, but pictures in general on smartphone computers, among mostly female musicians at Scottish Country Dancing on Monday evenings in Berkeley,

- warm hug between great long time friends also at SCD, musicians who were sitting next to each other, one female the other male

- photo sharing of grand daughter baby photos in utero on smartphone?

What would behaviorism say about this collection of behaviors - or could be extrapolated from to say / explain - say in terms of schedules of reinforcement?

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Behaviorism re schedules of reinforcement can inform learning so profoundly ... but while I could hypothesize that the above pleasurable behaviors could be a kind of "grooming" in higher primate senses (how could we create experiments about this?), and Skinner used behaviorism to work with "delinquent" behavior, behaviorism isn't really a theory generalizable to the above phenomenon.

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Operant conditioning: Schedules of reinforcement

https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat/behavior/learning-slug/v/operant-conditioning-schedules-of-reinforcement

(Looks like this Khan Academy video was created by Jeffery Walsh M.D. with further related resources here
- https://plus.google.com/u/0/110954328928536904597
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzr5henOY-jyfLaREAc0_1g
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/walshmd/ )

Reinforcement -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement

Schedules of Reinforcement -
http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Schedules.html

Operant conditioning chamber -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

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Curious how to create an operant conditioning chamber in a realistic virtual world for experimentation with virtual species re learning and schedules of reinforcement.

Curious too about the actual-virtual relationship re behaviorist STEM studies and operant conditioning, and the above example of Scottish Country Dance musicians.

Curious too how psychology students at World University and School at home and with their computers could begin to create rigorous behaviorist and operant conditioning learning experiments online and in front of their computers.

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